Michael Voss has the ability to have the boys frothing from the mouth for round 1.
Something Carlton Coaches haven't been able to do for a long long time.
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Despite being a senior coach of almost four seasons, Voss had to learn many aspects of coaching when he arrived at Port.
“He knew how to play, and at Port he learnt plenty about coaching,” Hinkley says.
“As a coach, you want go out and fix it yourself. As a player, Michael could go out and fix almost any problem himself.
“Here, he had to learn how to coach the game, not just do the game, and he had to learn how to teach people with lesser talent how to do the game, and that means spending hours on that player.
“He was sensational from the start. He never had a problem with working, he was a beast when it comes to working.
“Ask Ollie Wines. He would talk glowingly of Michael.”
Wines does.
“Vossy is the ultimate motivator, he’s the best at motivating that I’ve ever seen in my life,” the 2021 Brownlow medallist says.
The quest for redemption, or at the very least another opportunity, has taken Voss seven years.
Asked to describe the difference in Voss from then to now, Hinkley says: “It’s so clear to me. The aura and presence has never changed, the understanding and knowledge has got much greater, and he’s an educator. He also has a great handle on the buzz word called connection.”
Matthews says Voss now has a “good background to go coaching”.
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Vossy adores Matthews — and vice versa — but it’s Hinkley who has had the greatest impact in the second half of Voss’s football career.
Clearly, Voss arrived at Port Adelaide willing to learn.
“One of the big things I learnt with Ken … he helped me go to work on myself as coach, whether that was teaching people how to play the game, teaching people how to lead, or whether it was creating an environment which brought out the best in people. They were all challenges in the past seven or eight years that I grew enormously with Ken,” he says.
“I really loved my time with Ken. He taught me an enormous amount about the game and what I loved was, he gave me the room to be the coach you want to be and he always backed you in.”
Hinkley says that if Voss delivers a premiership to Carlton, it would surpass his accomplishments as a player.
“We both love the underdog and we both love that he’s getting off the canvas,” he says. “It would be huge.”